IT HAD BEEN one thing to run into her mother in town. That had felt unexpected. Accidental.
But this could have been any scene from her childhood.
When Keira stepped out onto the porch, Michael and Katy stood just inside the gate, looking shifty at this strange hour. Because Michael believed that keeping people off balance was a fine way to get them to do what he wanted. It was a major tool in what he considered his arsenal.
“It’s a little late to swing by, don’t you think?” Keira asked, surprised that she didn’t have to work too hard to sound calm.
As if the front porch was lifting her up and holding her steady.
Keira knew her parents couldn’t see Remy, though his truck announced his presence. He had chosen to stay out of sight, which made her feel almost ridiculously warm. He was right there, but he was letting her handle this. He might not love her the way he had, but he wasn’t the kind of man to stand by and let anything bad happen to her, either.
“If you wanted us to come by at a more convenient time, Keira, you should have issued an invitation,” Michael said in his most friendly, reasonable, you’re-being-irrational voice.
Keira tried to look for the good in this man, or at least something familiar. Something more than the basic biological things they shared, like a blood type and long arms.
Michael could be funny when it benefited him to be seen as funny. When he felt rich, he could even play at generosity, but only where people could see his largesse and compliment him on it.
At the end of the day, no matter how Keira looked, her father really was the man she saw before her tonight. Tall, with a dark beard and dark eyes, though there was more gray in the beard now and less hair on his head. His smile was mean, if you knew what to look for. And his eyes were flat, no matter how wide he smiled.
She could tell from the car he was driving and the edge to the way he looked at her that things were not going well for Michael Long.
When things were not going well for Michael, they tended to go badly for everyone around him, too. He was an expert at making them apologize, deeply shamed and confused, for the situations he’d caused.
And she understood now that no matter how much it had hurt, and no matter that Remy would never forgive her for it, she had been absolutely right to go away. To find her own path far away from these people. From her father, in particular.
Because there was a time when she would have felt racked with guilt and panic that she couldn’t solve her father’s problem, whatever it was. He always needed help, or money or something else Keira didn’t want to give. Time. Energy. Labor. All of the above.
But she had spent five years learning how to be an adult on her own. Which meant she knew that her father was extraordinarily bad at it himself. And better still, she knew it wasn’t her fault that he was such a failure of a grown-up. He didn’t want to succeed. He wanted to win something or have it handed to him. Anything else and he considered himself a victim.
That wasn’t Keira’s fault, either. None of this was her fault.
“You should go,” she told her father. “You shouldn’t have come out here in the first place.”
She tried to find her mother’s gaze, but Katy...disappeared when Michael was there. She turned herself into his shadow. The woman who would happily start something with her daughter on the main street of town faded away when her husband was near.
Keira had watched her do it her whole life. It had terrified her.
She’d asked Grandma June about her mother’s vanishing act all the time. Especially after she’d met Remy.
Did it happen all at once? she’d asked one time, when she’d been home from college and curled up there at the foot of Grandma June’s bed. Her grandmother had been sorting through the fabric scraps she kept in a big canvas bag for the new quilt she planned to make one day to replace the one Keira was lying on. Did my mother wake up one day completely under his thumb? Or was it more gradual?
Some people are born with an unfillable hole inside of them, Grandma June had said, her gaze on the fabric swatches as if they were something more than bits and pieces of other better things. Discarded strips of stuff that actually mattered more. And they’re always looking for something to fill it. Between you and me, it’s usually the worst thing they can find.
Keira knew the story. Katy had met Michael when she was young. Too young. And everyone always claimed that he’d molded her. Changed her from what she could have become into what she was.
And Keira had followed right along in her footsteps, hadn’t she? Michael had said that, too, when she and Remy had stopped keeping their relationship secret. Like mother, like daughter, he’d laughed.
Keira had wanted to argue that she was nothing like her mother, but that hadn’t been precisely true, had it? She remembered those early days. She’d wanted to melt into Remy. If she was brutally honest with herself, the way she’d learned to be, she’d disappeared a bit herself when she’d been with him.
She remembered her grandmother’s old, gnarled hands in all those brightly colored pieces of fabric. She remembered wondering if she was just another discarded thing Grandma June had collected because she didn’t like waste. Maybe if she kept Keira the way she kept all her leftover swatches from this and that, she could keep her granddaughter from making her daughter’s mistakes.
Love is supposed to be a good thing, Keira had said eventually. Isn’t it?
Grandma June had lifted her head from her bag of fabric and leveled a look on her that had made Keira think she knew exactly what sort of dark nonsense was running around inside her.
Love is a wonderful thing, Grandma June had said. It’s the things that look like love, but aren’t, that cause all the trouble.
Keira had concentrated fiercely on the quilt before her. How can you tell the difference?
Love doesn’t make you hurt other people, Grandma had said. Or yourself. Love makes you better, not worse.
Deep down, Keira had always been afraid that her parents sick, sad connection was no different from hers and Remy’s. And if it was no different, how could Keira be sure that she wouldn’t wake up one day and find she’d completely disappeared, right there in plain sight? How could she make certain she wouldn’t treat a child she and Remy might have the way her mother had treated her—as if she was an irritating afterthought, a mistake and, sometimes, a competitor for her husband’s wavering affections?
What if you don’t know what love is? Keira had asked on that visit, pretending she couldn’t hear her own voice crack.
You will, child, Grandma June had said, her gaze kind. I promise you, you will.
And that was what Keira had thought of when she’d broken up with Remy instead of accepting his ring.
She hadn’t known the difference then, but she did now.
Remy hadn’t liked it, but he’d let her go. He’d hated the choices she was making, but he hadn’t kept her from making them. And he hadn’t punished her when she’d come back. Instead, he’d made love to her as if she was more precious to him than ever.
There was nothing sick or sad about that man, or how he made her feel. There never had been.
And Keira wanted nothing more than to walk back inside, slam the door on her parents and focus on what actually mattered to her. But she knew she couldn’t. Not with the two of them seething out there in the dark while her father sized her up for weaknesses.
Because that was what he did.
And the only thing he knew how to do.
“Your mother and I don’t want any trouble, Keira bear,” Michael said soothingly, using that revolting nickname that he’d never actually called her when she was a child. He’d only ever used it in public, to convince other people that they were the sort of family who used endearments. It was all part of his act.
He probably couldn’t remember which was which.
“Why would there be trouble?” she asked.
“This is a little embarrassing,” Michael said with a chuckle. And it was the chuckle that clued her in. He knew Remy was here, of course. He knew whose truck that was, and that was why he was performing. “I’m not sure what made you think you can come back here after being away for so long and squat in your grandmother’s house like this. People are beginning to talk.”
“Even if they are talking, Dad, I doubt very much they’re talking to you,” Keira pointed out in the same calm voice.
Her father bristled, but he drifted up the path all the same. “Your grandmother wasn’t a very nice woman.”
Keira thought the house shuddered a little behind her at that. Or maybe that was just her.
“I know you won’t agree with me, but that’s called brainwashing,” Michael said with all the confidence in the world, none of which he deserved. “She wasn’t kind to her own daughter, you know. And that’s what counts.”
Keira shook her head. “I’m not the right audience for this. I’m really not.”
Michael nodded as if he understood that completely. As if he supported her fully in all things, despite the irony of him commenting on how parents treated their kids. What was funny was how little it hurt her now. She’d been away too long to let him get to her. Because once you could see his act, all you could see was his act.
But that particular freedom didn’t feel like any kind of joy. It was just sad. That was the thing with her father. Deep down, beneath everything, he always made her sad.
“Your mom and I talked it over,” he told her, his brow wrinkling in a convincing imitation of a concerned and kindly person. He must have seen one on TV. “Given that your mother is the only one of June’s daughters who stayed in town, we think it’s only fair that she gets the land and the cattle.”
There was a faint sound from behind Keira that could have been a door slamming. Or it could have been Remy letting out a laugh at the sheer gall on display here tonight.
She kept her eyes on Michael.
“I knew you couldn’t possibly be coming to visit me,” she said softly. “It always has to be about money with you, doesn’t it?”
“Lord knows your mother’s sisters aren’t worth a damn,” Michael continued in the same cheerful sort of way, as if this was a real discussion in which he was being more than fair to Keira, who clearly didn’t deserve that from him. Still, he soldiered on. “But that cattle operation makes a penny or two, I’d wager. And everyone knows what land prices are around here. So. It’s only fair.”
“It’s not yours,” Keira said, very distinctly. She shook her head at him, then cut her gaze to her mother. “It’s not yours, either, Mom. Didn’t you hear? Grandma June left a will. She was very specific. You’re not in it and this kind of behavior is why.”
And if they didn’t know about the seasons of cousins, she wasn’t going to clue them in. They could find out along with everyone else in Jasper Creek as the year wore on.
“You can’t really think you can turn up here a few weeks after a funeral and take over where you’re not wanted, can you?” Michael asked, and he didn’t sound quite so kind or cheerful any longer. “Or maybe you think you can slide right back into a life you threw away once already? That’s not how it works.”
“If you and Mom are interested in my life, I’d be more than happy to share it with you,” Keira said, and this time, emotion didn’t get the better of her. She could still feel the way Remy had held her out there on the street after her first run-in with her mother, and it gave her courage. His silent presence behind her, just out of sight, made her feel strong enough to handle both her parents, no tears necessary. “But I don’t think you are. You never have been before. I doubt very much that all of a sudden, a little before midnight tonight, you were seized with a powerful urge to find out what I’ve been up to all this time.”
“Now, Keira bear, you know you’re easily confused about reality sometimes,” Michael said, and he sounded both exasperated and sorrowful at once.
There was a time when that would have hurt her. It would have made her wonder. Was she confused? Why would he say something like that if it wasn’t true?
Even though she’d watched him do the exact same thing to her mother all her life.
Tonight Keira only shook her head. “You’re trying to intimidate me, shake me down the way you do everyone else, but it’s not going to work. Grandma June didn’t leave you anything. This farmhouse isn’t yours, the land isn’t yours, and the cattle definitely aren’t yours. You’re going to have to make your way without leeching off her. Or me.”
“You better watch your tone, young lady,” Michael began, and he put his foot on the porch step.
And then straight through it.
He pitched forward, letting out a shout and catching himself on his hands.
Keira stared. She’d sat on that step every day, every single morning, while she waited for Remy to pick her up. She could have sworn it was solid.
“That seems like a real clear message to me,” Remy said, coming out from behind the door.
And Keira could feel the heat of him as he came to a stop behind her and stood there like they were a unit. She knew they must look like one to her parents.
Her mother hurried over to help Michael up, but he was red-faced and furious, and slapped away her hands.
“None of this belongs to you,” Katy threw at Keira as if she was a stranger who’d wandered in off the county highway. “It’s not right.”
“When’s the last time you visited Grandma, Mom?” Keira asked softly. “And I don’t mean asked her for money, I mean really visited her. Sat with her and asked about her life. Did you ever?”
Katy glared at the house as if she wanted to hurt it, then transferred that look to Keira.
“I’m the one who came and tended the flowers in the garden when your grandmother’s arthritis got bad,” she said almost sullenly. “And maybe things could have been better between us, but the years are made of regret. That’s how it goes. Maybe you know your own life, Keira, but you don’t know mine. You don’t know me.”
Keira shook her head, glad Remy was there behind her and all around her, like the sweet Oregon air and the quiet strength of the mountains.
“You’re right,” she said. “But whose fault is that?”
Katy looked away. Keira should have been used to feeling heartbroken around her mother. But this felt different, somehow.
Because clearly Katy was capable of love and affection. But there was only so much to go around, and never much for Keira.
For the first time in her life, Keira felt certain that wasn’t her fault, either. She’d deserved better parents.
That felt like a revolution.
Katy swung her head back toward Keira and away from where Michael was aggressively brushing at his jeans like he could wipe away his fall that easily.
“I know you think your grandmother was perfect,” Katy said, “but she wasn’t.”
“I didn’t need her to be perfect,” Keira replied. “I didn’t need you to be perfect, either. I needed someone to love me, Mom, and Grandma June did. Always and without question. I don’t think you can say the same.”
And when her father started to respond, Katy shocked everyone—especially him—by shushing him.
“You have a lot of opinions about love for someone who didn’t know a good thing when she had it,” Katy said tightly, her gaze moving to Remy, then back. “I’m not going to apologize because I didn’t make that same mistake myself.”
“Of course not,” Keira agreed. “After all, if you start apologizing, where would you stop?”
She expected it all to ratchet up into yelling. Screaming. Maybe Michael would break more of the front step to prove a point. But something was different tonight. She could see it on her mother’s face. Something almost sad.
“Come on, Michael,” Katy said. Her gaze held Keira’s for an uncomfortably long moment, then dropped. “It’s time to go.”
As her mother and father went back to their car and climbed into it, Keira had the distinct sensation that was about as close to an apology as she was likely to get.
She stood there, Remy warm and solid at her back, and watched them drive away.
And then she hardly knew what to do. She’d always gone out of her way to keep Remy as far away from her parents as possible, so no matter what stories he heard about them, he would never see what they were like firsthand. She’d gone out of her way to shield him from it before.
But everything was different now.
“Family,” she said ruefully, turning around and checking his face for pity. But there was none. “I guess they’re always a whole thing, aren’t they? No matter what.”
Remy studied her face. He reached over and brushed back a stray piece of her hair, and Keira wanted nothing more than to curl herself up in his arms. Except maybe with kissing. And nudity.
You’d better not, she cautioned herself, though his glorious chest was right there in front of her. And he was looking at her the way he always did, as if she was the prettiest thing he’d ever beheld, so pretty nothing could ever tarnish her. Not even the choices she’d made that had hurt them both.
And suddenly she couldn’t remember why she needed to caution herself around him at all. After what had happened between them tonight, why was she bothering to pretend that she didn’t feel all the things she felt? All the things she’d always felt?
She knew better than to say them—
Or did she?
“Remy...” she began.
“I don’t really know what family is or isn’t, if I’m honest,” Remy said then, something hard settling on his face again and making her think he hadn’t heard her start to speak. Or knew what she had been about to say. He shrugged. “I haven’t really talked much to mine in years. Five years, if you’re counting.”